His Vietnam war plays like a late-night ad for a 1960s-era soundtrack collection, and when a character is stricken with AIDS, it is a pretty AIDS that makes the skin beautifully pale and takes life quietly (just the opposite of the hideous disfiguring illness that devoured Hanks the previous year in Philadelphia). Film, History and Cultural Memory: Cinematic Representations of Vietnam-Era America During the Culture Wars, 1987–1995 (PhD thesis).

Soon afterward, Lieutenant Dan finally thanks Forrest for saving his life, having "made his peace with God". Bruce Kawin and Gerald Mast's textbook on film history notes that Forrest Gump's dimness was a metaphor for glamorized nostalgia in that he represented a blank slate onto which the Baby Boomer generation projected their memories of those events.Woods Memorial Bridge in Beaufort while he was being interviewed by the press, and on West Bay Street in Savannah. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The Robin Wright screen test and the three kids tests are all excelent althought it would be nice to see some of the comments they received from the casting panel. Gump's core character and personality are also changed from the novel; among other things, his film character is less of a savant—in the novel, while playing football at the university, he fails craft and gym but receives a perfect score in an advanced physics class he is enrolled in by his coach to satisfy his college requirements. Film critic Pauline Kael came out of retirement to bash the film on a book tour; by year's end, New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin had gone from mildly praising the film in her initial review to putting it on her worst of 1994 list, describing Forrest as a "hollow man" who's 'self-congratulatory in his blissful ignorance, warmly embraced as the embodiment of absolutely nothing.

Jennifer Hyland Wang observes that the film idealizes the 1950s, as made evident by the lack of "Whites Only"-signs in Gump's Southern childhood, and envisions the 1960s as a period of social conflict and confusion. Winston Groom, who wrote the original novel, describes the film as having taken the "rough edges" off the character whom he had envisioned being played by John Goodman. After losing his legs in an ambush and being rescued against his will by Forrest, he is initially bitter and antagonistic toward Forrest for leaving him a "cripple" and denying him his family's destiny, falling into a deep depression. Writing in 2004, Entertainment Weekly said, "Nearly a decade after it earned gazillions and swept the Oscars, Robert Zemeckis's ode to 20th-century America still represents one of cinema's most clearly drawn lines in the sand. Recently, we've done several changes to help out this wiki, from deleting empty pages, improving the navigation, adding a rules page, as well as merging film infoboxes.

Tom Hanks stars as Forrest Gump, a grown man with the mind of a slow child, his IQ of 75 lifting him just above the cutoff line for the mentally retarded, sitting at a bus stop and relating his life story to a series of bemused strangers. This is the film's most perplexing period — especially as Zemeckis, apparently not paying attention, scores it with triumphant music and peppers it with shticky comedy.

Jennifer Hyland Wang argues in a Cinema Journal article that Jenny's death to an unnamed virus "symbolizes the death of liberal America and the death of the protests that defined a decade" in the 1960s. The film was nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards, winning three of them: Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, Best Director – Motion Picture, and Best Motion Picture – Drama.Forrest Gump won six Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Hanks, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Visual Effects, and Best Film Editing. Forrest Gump, you see, is merely a pendulum swing away from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's equally limited Leatherface. In 1981, a man named Forrest Gump recounts his life story to strangers who happen to sit next to him at a bus stop. In its opening weekend, the film placed first at the US box office, narrowly beating The Lion King, which was in its fourth week of release.